What are the best practices for storing complex JSON structures in a relational database?

Storing complex JSON structures in a relational database can be challenging due to the lack of native support for JSON data types in traditional databases. One common approach is to serialize the JSON data into a string before storing it in a text column. However, this can make querying and updating the data more difficult. Another approach is to use a separate table to store the JSON data in a more structured format, with each key-value pair stored in its own row. 

// Assuming we have a complex JSON structure stored in a variable $json

// Serialize the JSON data before storing it in the database
$serializedJson = json_encode($json);

// Insert the serialized JSON data into the database
$sql = "INSERT INTO json_data (json_data) VALUES (:json)";
$stmt = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$stmt->bindParam(':json', $serializedJson);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

JSON relational database data modeling serialization normalization

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